


Like a second heart

by Ruta



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Awesome Molly, F/M, Family Fluff, Mary Morstan Appreciation, Rosamund Watson is a Sherlolly fan, Sherlock is a Good Parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 03:25:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9950204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: Who was really her mother?This is a question Rosamund asks herself increasingly.She knows that there had been a woman, and that her name, the name she had chosen for herself, was Mary Watson. She knows that she has loved her dearly and that she would give her life to protect her. In a way she did.The fact is that Rosie doesn't know. She doesn't know what means to have a mother, not really, not in the usual sense.





	

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

 **John Banville**

 

_Who was really her mother?_

This is a question Rosamund asks herself increasingly.

She knows that there had been a woman, and that her name, the name she had chosen for herself, was Mary Watson. She knows that she has loved her dearly and that she would give her life to protect her. In a way she did.

She knows she was a daredevil and witty and insightful and bloody intelligent.

"And beautiful," Sherlock adds. At her puzzled expression, he rolls his eyes and twists his mouth, waving his hands in front of him in that frantic mood that occurs when a particular disturbs or irritates him and that decrees the thorny nature of the conversation they are facing. "Not that the information possess some relevance, but, as has been pointed out to me, my opinion about the nature of a variety of situations is often wrong. Therefore, Rosamund, I will reiterate the obvious, and I will praise the superfluous, stating that your mother was beautiful. For the rest of the world she was in a canon and boring way, for us who have known her, Mary was beautiful in the only way that matters."

He reaches out to place his finger against her temple, gently tapping. "In here," he says and puts his other hand on her chest, above the heart. "And in here." 

* * *

   
Among the others, Molly is the only one with which it is easier to talk about her mother.

Talk about her with Sherlock would be just as easy, if it were not for his (little) striking propensity to procrastinate or, worse yet, to take long detours that eventually make them stray from the initial topic.

Rosamund tries to avoid direct confrontation with her father because her questions end up dragging him in a flurry of unhappiness and depression that tend forcing him to take the day off from work.

Molly is a breeding ground and safe; has not hidden mines below. With her Rosamund does not need to be careful on what she says or how she says it, she does not have to take care not to appear too interested.

"How was she?" Rosamund asks her, in front of a bowl of ice cream - cherry for Molly, pistachio for herself.

The corners of Molly’s mouth are raised in that special smile that is typically hers. Rosamund has no idea how she manages it, but in that smile she summarizes a multitude of conflicting emotions. Molly's smile is an encyclopedia of feelings, as well as Sherlock’s mind is an encyclopedia.

"She was just like you." Arms crossed above the table, the curtain of hair that she cut recently framing her tired face. "Same cheeky smile, same shameless curiosity, same tendency to snoop into other people's relationships," she concludes with a Machiavellian glint in her dark eyes.

Rosamund takes another spoonful of ice cream, pretending not to understand what she is referring to (everything would be less complicated, she remembers thinking months ago, if Sherlock and Molly simply accept to take note of what is already obvious to anyone else).

"She was like you," Molly repeats and something in the way she pronounced the words, in the atmosphere that surrounds them is suddenly, fatally different from that of a few moments before. "Brilliant and exceptional compared with any other person I have ever known. She was like you, like Sherlock, like your father. Attracted by a certain lifestyle, by danger, adventure, like a moth seduced by the lure of the fire. At the same time she was like me, she had learned at her expenses the fragile beauty of an ordinary life and that the price for living it is always higher than estimated, but, _oh_ , if it's worth it."

"What was the price? For mom, I mean. What price she had to pay?" She asks, even though she thinks she knows the answer already. She deduced it in the traction of Molly’s back, in the tension of her hands, in her furrowed brow and in the way she contracted her lips.

 _Isn’t it obvious_ , demands a voice from the back of her conscience and the voice, needless to say, is a faithful reproduction of Sherlock Holmes’.

Molly’s eyes are wells of immeasurable sadness and for once they did not throw the lifebelt that could save her from drowning. "It was leave you," she says.

She seems to sink into the quagmire of everything she is feeling. She sinks and sinks until Molly’s hands stretch above the table, dodging the ice-cream bowl, and grab hers, bringing her to the surface.

"Your mother was a good person," Molly says firmly and urgently, but also reassuring. "She was a wonderful friend, a devoted wife and she would be a fantastic mother. Try to keep that in mind, okay?" 

Rosamund thinks of the collection of photographs that Molly gave her when she was very small, of the images that Sherlock preserves on the memory of an old cell phone that occasionally makes a sound like a moan, the radiant face of the woman in the frame that her father holds on the bedside table, smiling seraphically to the lens as the painting of the Mona Lisa, as if hiding a secret.

She is not sure to understand, perhaps she will never be able to do it, but life is this too. _To make mistakes and to fall, to get up and to find out._

She looks at Molly, at the silver threads in her  hair, at the smiling wrinkles around her mouth and she nods, trusting that even if that were the case, there will always be someone willing to listen, to unravel her confusion. "Okay." 

Molly squeezes her hand a bit 'stronger and it's there, in black and white, what Rosamund has sought all her life. Not the mother that she hasn't, but the one that she has.

* * *

   
If there is one thing that Rosie detests, more than anchovies and hypocrisy, it’s the look of commiseration that adults give her when they discover that she is motherless.

There's really nothing to be sorry about, nothing to be pitied for.

The fact is that Rosie does not know. She does not know what means to have a mother, not really, not in the usual sense.

She imagines that it means to be loved unconditionally, to receive these gestures of affection and understanding and indulgence that she has had the opportunity to observe - not without envy, she admits - in the privileged exchanges among her friends and their mothers, along with a thousand other ductile emotions and without circumscriptions and therefore all the more complicated to distinguish and grasp.

Rosie did not have the fortune to know her mother, but the reality of what she possesses makes it very easy to fantasize about what could have been added to what she has already.

Sherlock’s selective smile, for the small number of its rare receivers; the hoarse sound of his laughter when she manages to amuse him with a joke of black humor or one particularly biting; the sense of belonging and well-being that distinguishes the afternoons spent in the messy kitchen of 221B Baker Street to do homework ‘of dubious value' or to do experiments; as she is at ease in front of a microscope or with a Bunsen burner in her hands; the evenings spent reciting Shakespeare in front of Billy the Skull, reading Robert Louis Stevenson and Emilio Salgari, Greek dramatists such as Sophocles and Aeschylus; learn to turn off the noise of the world with violin concertos that have accompanied her since childhood, a constant background with a sweet aftertaste and mellow as maple syrup.

The expression of soft sweetness on Molly's face, so strong and brave and protective; the feeling of her kind and meticulous hands when she combed her hair and tied them in funny lopsided pigtails that she adored as a child; the long sessions of shopping spree in Portobello, Brick Lane, Camden and Rokit, to find out how to feel comfortable with a body that grows and changes, how to love it even when the mirror seems to show only flaws and imperfections; the second Wednesday of the month at the Prince Charles Cinema, for daydreaming impossible worlds, terrible and wonderful; Sundays baking cakes, stealing samples of dough, end up covered by a shower of flour and laughing until they have a stomach ache; the magnificent seven ladies of English literature, Terry Pratchett and the romantic and sad side behind the great tragic and adventurous stories.

The contrast of light and shade which chase one another deep in her father's eyes when, believing he's safe and not seen, he secretly searches in her profile, in the way she moves or talks, traces of the woman that he loved and still fills his heart. Her father in the moonlight, with a whiskey in his hands, talking of her to a shadow that no one else can see; that goes to the aquarium once a year and that on his return weeps silently, when he is convinced that she sleeps; that deposits a small bouquet (lily, calla lilies, white roses, hydrangeas, forget-me) on the grave of her mother on the day of their anniversary. Her father taught her to treat small superficial wounds and recognize the seriousness of an injury even before she learned to tie her shoes, whose embrace once bordered the magnitude of her world, but has never represented a border, only one frontier to cross every time before facing her personal battles.

Molly is the patience, his father is the impatience, Sherlock is the compromise.

Sherlock accompanied her to the shooting range for the first time, her father bought her a gun and showed her how to keep it in good condition, Molly convinced her to participate to self-defense lessons.

The pride of a good grade, a correct deduction, of a selfless action.

The anger of a lie, the punishment of their disappointment and the reward of their forgiveness because 'To make a mistake is human, Rosamund'.

The unique and special way they pronounce her name.

 _Rosamund_ , Sherlock says and it sounds like a tongue twister, a spell to banish away the ghosts of the past that now and then reappeared on the slopes of his infinite memory.

 _Rosie_ , says Molly, and in her voice there is the love of a woman, the only mother she has known.

And then there's her father. His 'Rosie' which is a reproach snorted when she comes home a few minutes late and he is standing in the hall, waiting for her, coat in hand, cell phone pressed against the ear and with one foot out the door, ready to go out to look for her and to alert the Inspector Lestrade, if necessary; 'Mary' for the more tender moments.

In conclusion, Rosie does not know what it means to have a mother, but the truth, simple and without frills, and only a bit 'painful, is that she does not even know what it means not to have none.

The importance of a father and of the family she has, even if unusual and unorthodox, banishes from her the melancholy of what might have been.

And her mother is there with her. In a way she likes to believe that she has been with her every moment of her life.

Rosie knows where to look for her, where to find her.

Mary is in Sherlock’s intense gaze, in Molly’s bright smile, in her father's apprehension. Her mother survives in them, as well as in their memories, just like a second heart that beats in unison with them, in the love they have for her.


End file.
